Creating a More Secure Internet

Trust is a fundamental requirement for people to use the Internet with confidence, and Cisco continues to find opportunities to make the Internet even more secure.

I am happy to share that we are a founding sponsor of a new public benefit consortium called the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). The goal of the ISRG is to advocate the use of SSL/TLS technologies by promoting the installation, use and maintenance of digital certificates for Internet services such as Web servers.

Digital certificates provide the anchor for secure communication, and more certificates enable more trusted network traffic. This initiative will significantly reduce the total surface area of exposure by preventing untrusted traffic from becoming bigger attacks.

Currently, deploying secure Internet services requires an intricate series of administrative steps. The ISRG is developing a set of open, standardized APIs for managing certificates and an initial Certificate Authority (CA) that implements these APIs. The vision is that all Internet services will seamlessly acquire and renew certificates during the normal server installation and maintenance processes. Over time, this frictionless approach should greatly expand the number of Internet services that are more rigorously secured.

The ISRG is launching with a diverse set of commercial and non-commercial sponsors. One of the reasons Cisco supports the ISRG approach is their commitment to the open community – its protocols and APIs will be open standards. The ISRG will develop them using a collaborative process, and as much of the software as possible will be open source. The CA it operates will make all records of issuance and revocation available for public inspection, for complete transparency.

Learn more about our involvement with the ISRG and how we collectively plan to support the ubiquitous use of encryption to keep our Internet safe.